do no harm:


idit dobb-weinstein: "teaching is action and thinking at once. What I try to guard against most when I teach is not speaking as if my answer were conclusive, so as to avoid (to the extent possible) any kind of dogmatic appropriation. It is understandable why students might wish to imitate their teachers, but there are different modes of imitation. I try very hard to avoid the mimetic appropriation that is immediate, passive, and occludes thinking. One other reason is that if I made clear what my views were, and my views appeared as if they were final, it would preclude the possibility of first, students challenging me and second, learning from my students. The relation between the student and teacher is, to me, a dynamic relationship . . . Teaching and learning is a movement that occurs between. In other words, we are at once both agent and patient, both teacher and learner. If we are not very careful, we can do a great deal of harm. And that, too, I have learned from my teachers, Maimonides especially.

I believe my task is to provoke students to think and to engage them in genuine dialogue and questioning. To paraphrase a rabbinic saying, 'I have learned from my teachers, and I have learned from my peers, but I have learned most from my students.' And that is a continuous process of learning."

Saturday 20 March 2010

okay so you probably know that my school, los angeles city college, loves to get sued.
http://jonathanturley.org/2009/02/15/los-angeles-city-college-sues-over-christian-based-presentation-in-speech-class/
whether it is hate speech or free speech, they like to make it easy to sue them.

that's great for lawyers, but not for taxpayers.
cheers!
http://www.elt-inc.com/our-solutions/harassment/california-sexual-harassment-training-law-ab-1825-and-elt-solutions/

are they compliant with CA AB 1825?

Basic Provisions of California's AB 1825

Two Hours of Training Every Two Years

The deadline for the first round of AB 1825 training was December 31, 2005. Thereafter, employers must provide two hours of sexual harassment training to each supervisory employee, every two years.
if they were i bet none of this nonsense would be happening.

and furthermore calling the vociferous homophobe a "bastard" or whatever would not have occurred.
maybe we should tell them about the internet.
thesauri.
but really, it might be better to get that laminated business 101 at borders books for the admin peeps.
keep it simple.
or send them a link.

or when they lose in court maybe they can go here for third party post litigation ethics oversight.
http://www.ethicspoint.com/
that was in my west's business law book.
i called and plan to tour their operation next time i'm in oregon.
they are helping lots of companies through the post-class action litigation.
that treads a bit on labor law territory.
check out my new blog, http://laborlawfornonlawyers.blogspot.com/


prevention is the cure.
ahhh!!!!!
they deserve a seven dollar ethics lesson, after all the entertainment!

or maybe they should read this
http://volokh.com/posts/1247685307.shtml

or all the awful things on ratemyprofessors.com about sexism in the paralegal department.  i was glad to know it wasn't just me.

observing incompetent admin is a spectator sport.

another thing i wanted to understand was that how harassment law for the workplace and in schools coalesce.  as the schools have federal laws to follow, and the state labor law i know pretty well, and then hey, what about  respondeat superior ?  that means the bosses are responsible for the mistakes of the workers.  hmmmm.


the poor collegian acts like printed media matters.  cute, isn't it?
i heard they are mad about censorship from the president.
http://www.splc.org/newsflash.asp?id=2011

i'm going to contact
the student press law center
Frank D. LoMonte, Esq.
Adam Goldstein, Esq..
Student Press Law Center
(703) 807-1904
splc@splc.org 


regarding passman's equivocal, oh there was such worse discrimination in her day theory: just because you lived through the sixties doesn't make mega-creepiness okay.
she is failing us all.
now a lot of professors have been included in my spam-power.
now its time to blog it write the splc and the collegian.

roll call
social sciences
sociology
gym
paralegal
speech class

how many more islamic students have been told they don't belong here because of the way they dress?
that story was straight from christy passman's mouth.
it's not funny.

who has walked out of class because of professor harassment?

who has suffered anxiety because of unfair treatment in class?

who is sick of laziness or just plain inanity?

who was in the class where the professor constantly makes masturbation references?

or prostitution references?

why do people tell me stuff like this? it bothers me.

i turned my head and said, "did he really just say that?"
prof:
"if told her that she's a sl*t & by walking the streets could make more money than by becoming a paralegal.
is this defamatory?" chortle.
not kidding.

who has been ridiculed as mexican, sl*t, wh*re, the n--- word an okay class room iteration, i am not kidding, with professors who speak about prostitutes and "hookers" excessively, who say stupid woman, dumb woman, cheesecake . . .
who obviously aren't up-to-date on international law or human trafficking issues either . . .

if we are at LACC, we are too poor to be wasting our time.

and you know what? i am more liberal than you'd ever imagine.
private lives are private.
but when the class content is destroyed by verbal excesses from professors with no super-ego supervision or sense of modernity . . . respect, or respect to the school and taxpayer .  . .
we all suffer.

if i wanted to be around trashtalk pop culture i would buy a TV.
sweetman (legal department head) and passman said, ahhh, they were just trying to be funny!

i told them this is not a stand-up comedy club.
it's a school.
and as michael richards proved, there are limits to the acceptable, even at a comedy club.

but its becoming clear to me that admin are the biggest comedians at the club.

some kinds of language have no place anywhere, especially in a diverse school with people from all over the world.
if this were the all white male skull and bones university frat club in 1910, i think all the racism and sexism might be a little more culturally appropriate.

but hello!!!!!!
it's the future!
"it's the future, get down!" as intone my favorite political rappers Das Racist.  on youtube you can watch them talk about being inspired by the kid who called out about some deranged racist ideologue on TV, "that's racist!" where normally the conditioned adult response would be to politely say, "that's offensive."
but that they are tired of watering it down.
why dilute it?
its racist, sexist, whatever, why not just say it?!
http://www.myspace.com/dasracist

as for the professors, i just thought they were trying to get fired . . .
retired . . .
i don't blame them . . .
i'm sorry they didn't get retired so they can relax a little, and watch more TV and drink more scotch . . .
i'm sorry they still think they should be teaching.
and some of them are doing better, now that i complained.

but thanks to christy passman . . .
they are still paid staff . . .
and i know good teachers out of work . . .
thanks to student complicity

people come tell me stuff.  why? why don't they complain to everybody like i did?
or maybe they complain like i did, and are treated dismissively like i was.
that's scary.

of course they all did nothing. admin. sacramento.  the feds.
jamillah moore, sweetman, the nice dean who looked rather shocked at me being assigned to write a paper defending topless dancing as free speech for the prostitute-obsessed, and extra creepy, creep.

christie said take it to ASO.
like i should do her job for her, for free.
right.
because she has no guts or relevance.

CEDAW.
read about it.

what other departments allow incompetence so extreme it just has lawsuit written all over in flashing neon?

this is fraud to the taxpayers.
and professors write to tell me they don't have time for unimportant things like equality.

or saying i don't get why you care, usually people only care when they have something at stake.
like money?
like dignity?
like community?
like respect?
like equality?
like professionalism?
like education?

if you are a taxpayer, i hope you are happy to know you fund discrimination at LACC.
like the UCLA taser case, we need to get the lawyer's guild on this.

to personally contextualize this argument, it might be important to let you know a little about my background so you can discredit me.
#1 female---just kidding!
normally i like to keep art and life separate.
but what is very significant to me is the extreme degree of respect my father showed me my entire childhood.
he never spoke crassly of women.
he was a champion of civil rights in the fifties and sixties, even into the oughts when he helped get the first black musician, deford bailey, inducted into the racist country music hall of fame.
he helped single mothers get education and jobs and houses in the war on poverty social programs that got slashed to pieces by reaganomics.
he changed strangers' busted tires.
he really liked oprah winfrey.
i remember the first time i tried to understand the word rape as i saw it published in the newspaper when was about eight.
and then reading about the childhood rape oprah made public in her autobiography.
my dad had feminism in his library and emily dickinson was one of his biggest heroes.
emily bronte, too.
he was traumatized by the vietnam massacres and by his fears of his father's CIA job.
i remember how he taught me the protocol for assassination, through dissolution of identity, and microtasking of orders, and a complicated chain of command, so that nobody knows really who anybody is and who killed whom.
it bugged him.
he had so much compassion . . .
he was smart enough to evade the killing scene . . .
he was addicted to caffeine tablets and told us when he took too much.
his brain is fried now cold silent.
he might have got secretly dosed acid back in the sixties at a party.
he saw connections where no one else did.  it was the most magnificent thing about his mind.

my mother told me she decided to move to the integrated neighborhood in nashville tennessee because she didn't want me to grow up racist like some of my delusional relatives in oregon.
the little kids from racist families in my neighborhood were forbidden to play with me and michael because we played with marcel and danjele.
that was weird when my mom had to explain racism.
of course it makes no sense to kids.

i saw racist police brutality at age seven, and in 2007 at macarthur park.
hey taxpayer, you just got billed a huge settlements to the victims of the LAPD macarthur park brutality extravaganza.
cheers!
my mother kicked a KKK wizard out of her veteran's administration emergency room, because she's tough like that.
there is a rumor that my grandmother was an honorary black panther.  both my grandmothers helped immigrants with literacy and activism.

then in 2005, my amazing brother gabriel eng, threw a big africa art, music, and  sustainability festival.
the young black panthers spoke.
the most valuable thing i remember were the words, "renounce your white skin privilege."

it is still sinking in.
renounce your white male heterosexist privilege.
renounce it all.
do not accept the benefits which are given to you by accident.
protest heterosexist marriage/civil unions.
protest sexist churches
protest homophobic churches.
protest and renounce this.

so to get back to my story----i was a reader. i read everything. really. darwin, tolstoy, everything, almost.
now i like to skim around in 1000 page law books, and i love the big old internet!!!!
i read all the old school feminism, women novelists, virginia woolf, jeanette winterson, julia kristeva, hannah arendt, luce irigaray, anna akmatova, djuna barnes, anais nin, kate chopin, plath, sexton, sappho, edna st. vincent millay, austen, the brontes.
i was quite delighted to find my father discussing sappho and mystical lesbos in an essay previewed on google books.
it was dawning on me how lucky i was to grow up under his tutelage.
his old quaker fiance taught him about peace.  he was a sensitive guy, a nouveau romantic poet. the sensitive scorpio, to my mother's determined takecharge capricorn, forget gender norms.
my dad was an atheist with a huge collection of occult books, satanism, anarchism, witchcraft, possessions, feminism, politics, literature, history . . .
my mother is very catholic, in the progressive catholic worker sense, the mother theresa sense.
she paid other people's rent, bought them food.  we put up homeless families and handicapped parishoners in our home.
father strobel, our priest was like an uncle.  he put the homeless first, defying the church.
his mother, mary catherine, was stabbed to death on the way to the soup kitchen with a sack of potatoes.
not kidding.
she looked pale in a baby blue dress in her coffin.
a little boy was lynched two miles from my family home.  i was eight or so.  he was seven.  he had the wrong color.
my mother told me about eating in the segregated colored restaurant because she couldn't stand to be around all the racists. and how they looked at her funny.
she worked for the blind and deaf in detroit.
she sent me some edith stein.

my favorite professor wayback had to sue my creepy old alma mater for discriminatory tenuring etc.
i'm so proud of her.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=6th&navby=case&no=99a0243p

equality at school is just one of my pet causes.
i have way too much passion to go around, since my will to live came back.

i'm going to LACC because i dropped out of my big fancy scholarship education around a bunch of conceited rich kids, because they got on my nerves, as did a few of the professors. plus i was  generally starving myself for lack of money for food or clothes.

then when the stupid CIA money came it all went to enron, make no mistake.  i was hoping to tell grand-dad i needed to get back to school, because i was too smart to deal with all the stupid stuff in real life.
instead though, he died, and i got left out.
that's not too important.
but now that i've finally made it back to school, after hanging out in the extremes of impovrished america to faux-ivy league with fullbright scholars etc.  i really got to say that my standards are high because i allow them to be.

so i sent out mad letters two days ago.
i'm laughing out loud.
i cc'ed all the offending proff's in and gave them an invite to mail me a written legal defense of their creepy harassing behavior, and or an apology.
isn't that funny?????
who would do that?

so basically i want to start an equality coalition.
and meet and discuss the international and local issues regarding equality.
i already want to ask all my friends who told me about their bad experiences.
then we can make a compendium of incidents and publish it here and give it to the collegian and the FIRE group and to passman and all the deans and leader people.
and make sure we don't forget disability educational access equality too.
because the students with disabilities are being hurt really bad by the budget cuts, and by lack of tech and resources and tutors.

so if anybody reads this thanks and be in touch.
maryeng1@yahoo.com
and hey, if yr a good writer maybe you can help translate all this.
don't blame me for my chattery style.
linearity is my nemesis.
it gives me panic attacks.
i read a lot of surrealism, breton, the poets, dadaism, ezra pound, antonin artaud, bataille, james joyce, pynchon, etc.
i love chaos
so don't tell me to start making sense, or speak english, or punctuate, or speak in sentences.
this is just a blog.
grammar can destroy impact of force and waste time.

old letter:

flash back to two days ago (and a year ago when this stupid story started---maybe i'll repub the old emails too---or yelp them---e-evidence them out into the cosmos and collective BSometer consciousness or Yelp them and make LACC pay to remove them from top search query, i love YELP's monetization of internet libel extortion scheme---its brilliant!!!! oh yeah but they're being sued too . . .)

i wrote
to the LACC ombudsman for discrimination,
you know who,


i deeply apologize for differing in opinion re:the handling of the "sl*t" case (encompassing a whole series of incidents)
while not quid pro quo
it was rather atmospheric

i maintain my allegation that language has a permanent lasting effect on the recipients (or eligible parties) who are thus designated 

and therefore are subject to unequal treatment
in contradiction to my interp of fed & state law and handbook rules

it was not in any way to disparage your job, that i semi-publicly draw attention to this scandal, but for the good of all.

i am glad the outcome with anonymous student turned out well in your estimation. thanks for the update.

i don't feel okay about it though.

i spoke to her and find it dissatisfactory that she must retake the class with the verbally offensive sexistly and particularly seemingly racially discriminatory professor as well, based on what i know of the case.

who has the burden of proof here?
i saw what went on.

i think she should have her grade restored due to the disabling effects of anxiety that might affect any student receiving double hostilities verbally.

what else would define hostile atmosphere?

also, i do not want to alienate your support of the new videostreaming technologies platforms that will make the digitization of classes affordable for future ADA access rights expansion.

there is a meeting at 3pm tuesday with bartelt matranga flores eckford and perhaps kendis
any and all may email susan matranga for more info.
supposedly the new dean supports.
in demonstration with kendis

how would the brown act apply to the classroom?

and of course i do not want you to be alienated from the anthropology clubs dreams of big fundraising for the africa trip.

i am at ASO and hope to find out more about ASO fundraising guidelines.

i also apologize for my impatience with ASO, because there is such a wealth of human potential here.

re: the islamophobic comments which may or may not have been faculty originating, but were (according to you) staff-originating. i did not seek to misrepresent.

i find that the notion of best practices business management would have all staff clearly documented as to harassment training.

you should have budget allocation for this.

please accept my apology.  i respect you so much! i need your help too and the wealth of your legal knowledge!

any help you can lend to fundraising or future equality of learning atmosphere, would be greatly appreciated by myself, and others no doubt.

i am also open to accepting apologies in writing, or written legal defenses, from the professors/staff who misspoke,played grossly inappropriate racist and sexist film, and/or covered for them.

thanks and have a lovely weekend,
mary eng
the IT blocks must be addressed before we can proceed as well as the new routers for web permeation